Celeste Ng quotes

You don't feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy. (Celeste Ng)
What made something precious? Losing it and finding it. View quote
Celeste Ng
In fiction you're not often writing about the typical; you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour... another part comes from my personality: I'm an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody. View quote
Celeste Ng
The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished-and meaning is made-not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through. View quote
Celeste Ng
They never discussed it, but both came to understand it as a promise: he would always make sure there was a place for her. She would always be able to say, Someone is coming. I am not alone. View quote
Celeste Ng
Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it. View quote
Celeste Ng
The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you--whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to. View quote
Celeste Ng
You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it. View quote
Celeste Ng
He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another. View quote
Celeste Ng
It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales. View quote
Celeste Ng
You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space. (Celeste Ng)
People decide what you're like before they even get to know you. View quote
Celeste Ng
Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way. View quote
Celeste Ng
She understands. There is nowhere to go but on. Still, part of her longs to go back. View quote
Celeste Ng
I think even if I did try to write something that had nothing to do with women or race, which are two pretty broad topics, I don't know how I would do that. I don't think there's a way that I could write a buddy cop drama, or something really far from anything I've written, that didn't have pieces of race and gender. Those are parts of the world we live in, and they are things I think about. It all comes into the voice of your writing, and you can't write about someone else's voice. You can only write in your own. View quote
Celeste Ng
Your experience has so much to do with how you view difference and how you approach being in the world. For example, in the grocery store, if someone comes down the aisle, I always preemptively move to the side-I've had many experiences where I get a glare or a huffy scolding or even a racial slur if the person feels I'm in the way. My parents did the same; years of experience as part of a racial minority taught them that to be noticed often means being harassed, so they try to avoid attention of any kind. On the other hand my husband, who is white, continues whatever he's doing. His reasoning is ‘If I'm in the way, they'll just ask me to move,' and he's right. The world treats him differently, so he sees it very differently. View quote
Celeste Ng